Toward the interoperable software design models: quartet of UML, XML, DOM and CORBA

Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely accepted as an object-oriented analysis/design methodology in the software engineering community, and is in the process of revised standardization at OMG (Object Management Group). One of the current major enhancements is SMIF (Stream-based Model interchange Format) specification, which aims to interchange UML models in a standard based way. It is expected to be based on XML (eXtensible Markup language) standard and used in various development tools such as CASE tools, automatic documentation tools and repositories. This paper addresses a standard-based UML model interchange and presents our effort to make UML interoperable. We developed a XML-based exchange format called UXF (UML eXchange Format) and a distributed model management system for UML. The system leverages the team development reuse of design models and tool interoperability by interchanging the model information with XML through the Document Object Model (DOM) interface that is implemented on top of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). DOM provides a platform and programming language neutral interface to manipulate the content, structure and style of documents. Our work shows a practical application of some key standards in terms of the software model interchange. It provides multiple levels of interoperability for UML, thereby UML models can be highly interoperable.